Sunday Scribblings included!

This week, over at Sunday Scribblings, the theme is Work: First job, worst job, dream job... and this struck me as apt, because the reason I've been largely absent from Blogland over the past couple of weeks is work. I won't be saying a whole lot about my new job here, but after a lengthy period of training, preparing and planning (since April, with holidays in between, of course), I've finally started the work I was hired to do - with young people, counselling in school settings. And it's great to be doing the actual work! It's not easy to be in a job while not actually doing what you're meant to be doing!

While this work (right now) is taking my full-time attention and is a full-time commitment, it is, in fact, a part-time job - seeing me in schools 4 mornings a week, so I am able to do other work as well: I'm continuing an afternoon's voluntary counselling in a women's centre. I'm teaching a psychology class one evening a week. Some weekends, I'll be doing workshops in SoulCollage, and next Friday, I get to do one of my favourite things - a poetry workshop with 11- and 12-year-olds in my home-town library as part of a poetry festival.

This is what I've wanted for a long time (and wrote about, as a dream-future, during The Artist's Way), and now it has fallen into place - a range of work, in the fields of therapy and creativity. I've heard the exalted term for it is a "portfolio career". I cannot believe at times that it has come to pass in my life. I have the space for flexibility. I can still see clients to work with them with Bach Flower Remedies. I'm wondering about taking level II and III of Reiki and offering that as a complementary therapy to my other work. There are a whole range of possibilities still available to me.

Right now, I feel I am doing what I'm meant to be doing in my life. Maybe the balance is a bit unsteady, as I am so much in transition into this new pattern, but overall, it seems there is space in this worklife for all the things that are important to me. Much of what I do doesn't seem like "work", in fact, even if it is something for which I may earn money; and some of what I do (writing, volounteer counselling) doesn't provide an income, but I approach it as seriously and professionally as I would if it did.

I feel immensely grateful that the journey I've taken in the world of work has led me here, through accounting and administrative jobs that didn't feed my soul in any way (but from which I learnt much about being systematic, about detail), through 21 years of motherhood and years of study in a new field, to now, on the cusp of my second half-century with the feeling of being of use in the world, with the sense that what I do is important for me, and useful to other people.

I have suffered from feeling inadequate, incapable and totally lacking in confidence. I have experienced the imposter syndrome, (and don't doubt that any or all of those experiences could await me tomorrow, next week, next month or next year) but right now, at this moment, I'm glad to be asked to reflect on Work, because right now, at this moment, I feel good about it. This feels good.

Want to visit other workers? Head over to Sunday Scribblings!